Senior Machine Learning Research Engineer I/ II, Open-Endedness

We’re seeking a Machine Learning Research Engineer for the Open-Endedness Team with expertise in large model training and optimizing novel algorithms for best results in distributed ML infrastructure. You’ll design and maintain large-scale training systems, optimize performance for large models, and integrate cutting-edge techniques to improve efficiency and throughput.

Open-Endedness is an emerging area of machine learning that aims to automate never-ending innovative processes of discovery and exploration. The Open-Endedness Team, led by Ken Stanley, investigates in particular how a continual chain of deep transformative creativity can be maintained that far exceeds the derivative creativity seen in current models. In effect, the systems developed on this team will go beyond simply solving problems posed by users, to conceiving the future unimagined directions of science itself.

• Distributed training infrastructure for LLMs and multi-modal models.
• Performance optimizations for large-scale model training including training and optimization workflows (SFT, RL, long-context, etc.).
• Orchestrate frontier and open source LLMs along with complex compute-intensive tool use
• Scalable pipelines for data preprocessing and experiment orchestration, including tools for efficient data loading, pipeline parallelism, and optimizer tuning.
• System-level performance benchmarks and debugging utilities.

• Proven experience with distributed ML training frameworks (Megatron-LM, TorchTitan, DeepSpeed, Ray).
• Strong software engineering skills (Python, C++ kernel contributions are a plus).
• Understanding of large-scale model training techniques.
• Experience with cloud or HPC environments.

• Prior work with scientific datasets or domain-specific modeling.
• Contributions to open-source ML frameworks.

Lila Sciences is building Scientific Superintelligence™ to solve humankind's greatest challenges. We believe science is the most inspiring frontier for AI. Rather than hard-coding expert knowledge into tools, LILA builds systems that can learn for themselves.

LILA combines advanced AI models with proprietary AI Science Factory™ instruments into an operating system for science that executes the entire scientific method autonomously, accelerating discovery at unprecedented speed, scale, and impact across medicine, materials, and energy. Learn more at www.lila.ai.

Guided by our core values of truth, trust, curiosity, grit, and velocity, we move with startup speed while tackling problems of historic importance. If this sounds like an environment you'd love to work in, even if you don't meet every qualification listed above, we encourage you to apply.

Lila Sciences is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.

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